RENTON — The last time the Seattle Seahawks traveled to our nation’s capital, it was for a playoff matchup between two teams with seemingly bright futures.
Both Washington and Seattle entered that 2012 wild card game as teams on the rise, and more importantly in a quarterback-driven league, as teams that both appeared to have found franchise signal callers in the draft earlier that year. With Robert Griffin III leading Washington and Russell Wilson running the Seahawks’ offense, it was easy back then to assume we were watching the beginning of the NFC’s version of the New England-Indianapolis rivalry that featured nearly annual AFC playoff games between Tom Brady’s Patriots and Peyton Manning’s Colts.
Heading into that wild card game, Seattle had an 11-5 record, while NFC East champion Washington was 10-6. The Seahawks won in dramatic comeback fashion, and since that day, the two franchises, and their quarterbacks, have traveled dramatically different paths. Since the end of the 2012 regular season, playoffs included, the Seahawks are 20-5 and have earned a Lombardo Trophy. In that same time, Washington has gone 4-17.
Wilson, meanwhile, only continues to improve, is a two-time Pro Bowl player, and after the overtime win over Denver, has people debating if he might be better than the No. 1 pick in 2012, Andrew Luck.
Griffin, the player taken one pick after Luck, has gone from can’t-miss super star, the 2012 rookie of the year, to a player whose future is very much in doubt. He played through an injured knee late in his rookie season, tore his ACL in that loss to Seattle and then was rushed back for the start of the 2013 season when he clearly wasn’t himself. After a sub-par second season, followed by a serious ankle injury to open the 2014 campaign, plenty around Washington are wondering if he is even the long-term answer at quarterback, or if Kirk Cousins is the better bet.
So what happened? How did two teams seemingly on such similar trajectories end up in such different places heading into Monday night’s game in Washington?
While there are plenty of factors in play, it’s impossible not to start with the quarterbacks, both in terms of how they have played, and also how they were acquired.
While the Seahawks made multiple attempts at finding the right quarterback under Pete Carroll and John Schneider, they never mortgaged the future to find that player. First they gave up a third-round pick to acquire Charlie Whitehurst, who couldn’t come close to unseating incumbent Matt Hasselbeck.
Then the Seahawks signed Tarvaris Jackson, who was solid, though not great in 2011. After that it was signing Matt Flynn to fairly lucrative, though far from crippling contract in March of 2012. A month later, despite signing the player everyone assumed was their starter, the Seahawks took Wilson in the third round of the draft, a move that worked out better than anyone, Schneider and Carroll included, could have realistically envisioned.
Washington, meanwhile, saw Griffin as a once-in-a-generation talent (OK, maybe twice in a generation since Luck was in that same draft) and made a very aggressive move to get him. It gave up the sixth pick of that draft, first rounders in 2013 and 2014, and a 2012 second-round pick to acquire the No. 2 pick.
By the end of the 2012 season, that looked to be a steep but necessary price to pay for a star quarterback. Two years later, however, as Washington struggles to compete with a roster that surely could use some of those traded-away picks, the trade looks like a disaster, and will continue to unless Griffin can eventually come back and be the player he was in 2012.
And while it’s easy to second-guess Washington now for that trade, what isn’t up for debate is that the Seahawks demonstrated a piece of what has made them the NFL’s best franchise in the way they acquired Wilson.
Despite inheriting a team with no long-term solution at quarterback, Carroll and Schneider refused to force the issue. Instead they tried a few different options while building a young, deep and talented roster by not only hanging onto their draft picks, but by frequently trading back to add more picks — picks that they turned into players like Kam Chancellor, Richard Sherman and Bobby Wagner, all cornerstones of Seattle’s defense who were drafted with selections acquired by moving back.
“I just like it in general,” Schneider said prior to the 2014 draft when asked about his propensity for trading back. “Is that OK to say? I’m not giving anything way, am I?”
“Say you have eight guys in the fifth round that you really like, is it really worth losing two of those eight guys to go up and get one player? Is that one player worth two of those guys? … The temptation is to go get guys instead of going back and acquiring more picks,”
It’s a temptation that Schneider and Carroll have been able to avoid, even when it came to Wilson, a player Schneider really wanted to get in 2012. The Seahawks could have just taken Wilson in the second round that year and not had go through the stress of waiting for pick No. 75 to roll around, but Schneider trusted his draft board and believed they could take Wagner in the second round and still get Wilson later.
“Quite honestly I prayed about it a bunch,” Schneider said at Super Bowl media day when asked about that wait to pick Wilson. “We try not to panic in our room. We listen to Reggae music and we don’t have the TVs on. When we have the TVs on, we have the volume turned down. We try to keep a very calm atmosphere where if we need to have discussions, we can talk about it. When he started coming closer to us, there was a group of quarterbacks taken higher and then there was a second group that was going to start going in there. I didn’t know if he was going to be the first one or not, but I knew we weren’t going to go by him again.”
The Seahawks could have missed out on Wilson because of their patience, but instead they not only got the steal of the draft in Round 3, they also landed a player who would become one of the NFL’s top middle linebacker with a pick that could have been Wilson had they panicked and pulled the trigger early. Those kinds of decisions, ones that net an extra star-caliber player on Day 2 of the draft, played out year after year, are the ones that can make the difference between a Super Bowl title and a losing season.
As a coach, Carroll wants to acquire the best players he can to compete for playing time and roster spots, but he has full trust that Schneider knows what he’s doing, even if that means waiting longer than is comfortable to pick a potential impact player.
“(Schneider) kind of has a sense for what’s going to happen and what we can expect, and he’s been really good about that,” Carroll said. “When we get to that time, I’m not as tense as he was (waiting to draft Wilson). We had set the plan in motion, we knew what we were doing. He was pretty uptight about it at the time, but he was right, he was dead on. It’s just a matter of talking through it and gauging the draft and the people that are coming up and who’s available. There are a variety of variables that decide that, but basically when it comes down to it, you go from your gut and I trust John to have a great sense for that.”
And it’s not that the Seahawks always will trade back just for the sake of trading back. While they haven’t made a massive move up in the first round like Washington did to acquire RGIII, the Seahawks have stayed put when they knew they had to act in order to get the player they wanted. Most notably, in their first draft together, Schneider and Carroll were ready to move back from the No. 14 pick to acquire more draft ammunition, but when Earl Thomas was still sitting there, they jumped at the chance to take him. And yes, it’s safe to say that decision worked out pretty well.
That trust in the draft board, whether it means moving back to add picks that can help strengthen the roster, or sitting tight when the right player is there, is a big reason the Seahawks are defending champions who are well positioned to succeed this year and beyond, while Washington’s aggression in 2012 has contributed to a dramatic slide.
It’s too soon to declare that trade a failure — Griffin is still young and plenty talented enough to bounce back and have a bright career — but heading into Monday rematch of that playoff game, it’s hard to argue that Seattle’s philosophy of draft weekend patience has paid big dividends.
Herald Columnist John Boyle: jboyle@heraldnet.com
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